Episode
FiveStack: Don’t Believe Your Lying Eyes
- Published
- Jun 23, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3634
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://www.narativ.org/p/fivestack-dont-believe-your-lying
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Summary
Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan. Denver Riggleman came on to break down five stories. He left having broken news of his own: the former Republican congressman and intelligence officer told Zev Shalev he is “at 99%” to run for governor of Virginia — and to run unaffiliated, as a one-man “party of the rational.” The reveal landed at the end of an hour that kept circling one idea. A president too weak to wait — collapsing abroad, sinking at home — is rushing everything, blaming everyone, and selling a peace nobody believes, while the guardrails that used to catch him are being pulled out one at a time. Filling in for Dean Blundell, Riggleman brought the credential that made the day’s intelligence story personal: fifteen years in the Air Force, a posting at the NSA, and four oaths to the Constitution. Here is how the five fit together. 5️⃣ The Green-Slime Lagoon Trump painted the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool “American flag blue” for the 250th. The dark coating cooked the water, the algae bloomed, the paint peeled — and the president blamed vandals he cannot produce, routing reporters to the Interior Department and an investigation of “six people” while offering no evidence of his own. Riggleman read it as the whole administration in miniature. “An inveterate liar is going to inveterately lie,” he said. “It’s like, don’t believe your lying eyes.” The decision tree behind the pool, he argued, is the same one behind everything: “How does it help me? How does it help my buddies? How does it bind them to me? And where do we make money?” Zev called it the work of “the distraction president” — a man spending taxpayer hours on the color of a pool while the country slides. The vandals always appear. The proof…